G8 India / The Built World And The Daily One

Housing Is A Verb More Often Than It Is A Noun

Many homes are built in stages over years, growing as money and family circumstances allow.

In a lot of places, a house is a finished object you buy or rent. Elsewhere it is a process. A structure gets built to the point of being liveable, and then it waits. Reinforcing rods stand up from the roof slab because another storey is intended when funds allow, perhaps when a child marries, perhaps when a business has a good few years. A wall gets plastered on the side that faces the street and left rough on the side that does not. A staircase gets built before the rooms it will eventually serve. None of this is unfinished in the sense of abandoned. It is finished for now.

This staged approach explains a great deal about how neighbourhoods look. Streets contain buildings at every point on the same trajectory, which produces a skyline of visible intentions. It also explains ownership patterns, because a building extended over a generation tends to hold a family across generations, with floors allocated to different households who share a stairwell, a water tank and a set of long standing negotiations about noise, parking and who fixes the pump.

The rental market sits alongside this rather than replacing it. Rooms get let within family buildings. Ground floors get let to businesses. The boundary between residential and commercial is porous by design, because a building that must earn its keep will find a way to earn it. Read that way, the built environment is not a picture. It is a record of decisions made under constraint, and most of the decisions are sensible.